Geek Out: Crowdsourcing Data Science With Kaggle

Remember those science fairs back in junior high school? Depending on how geeky you were, projects ranged from growing mold on potatoes (not geeky at all) to determining the thermodynamic solubility of nanotubes that could be used to build a bridge to the moon (uber-geeky and an actual science fair winner). Enter Kaggle, a startup that runs grown-up competitions for data scientists. These brainiacs work to solve a company’s data questions in an attempt to win the company-sponsored financial reward or just for the pleasure of showing off. The idea is that a little crowdsourcing competition will come up with the best predictive and analytic models for things such as traffic forecasting, chess ratings, and predictive medical diagnoses. Related Article: Code Kings: 10 Places Your Team Can Develop Programming Skills Founded…